background

The résumé--a portrait of a potentially desirable employee--is a standard kind of profile. The word comes from the French, meaning to "sum up," and traditionally a résumé is a summary of one's educational background and work experience prepared for a prospective employer. Résumés, as anyone who has composed one knows, typically follow fairly conventional guidelines: information is organized in categories--such as Objective, Education, Experience, and Activities--with the most important information listed first. You can see from my curriculum vitae (CV) there are traditional standards for presenting qualifications for academic employment. This generally holds true for all teaching, research, and administrative positions in higher education.

Typically, résumés are an organized summary of one's educational background and work experiences. They tell a very specific kind of story about you, in an incredibly structured way. We're going to break the rules by deviating from the usual impersonal format and content.

I created this assignment because I found that creating a résumé where you provide details about your personal or professional life, details you would normally not include, actually teaches more about the genre of the resumé than replicating the information you already have on a current resumé. The genesis of the anti-résumé grew out of assigning Anne Sexton's Résumé 1965. It's not surprising that a poet like Anne Sexton, known for her intense confessional poetry would produce an unusually revealing résumé .

the project

The anti-résumé can take many forms. Like the résumé, it is up to you to decide what details and kinds of information to include. The idea behind the assignment is to create a document full of revealing information you would never see on a typical résumé. For example, you might list jobs you quit or were fired from. Or you might create a dating résumé. There are many creative ways to approach the anti-résumé. You can use a traditional format, or something like Sexton's example. You can create an digital résumé if you like. Be creative, fun, silly. But most of all be revealing. Tell a story about yourself in this genre. Break the rules.

You do not have to model your anti-résumé on Sexton's example. Similar to the résumé, you want to think about how you are framing yourself. For example, in my anti-résumé, I frame myself as a writer, first and an academic second. You can choose a number of ways to represent yourself or selves. And you can write in story form or not. You have the freedom to create the document you feel best represents a facet or facets of your identity.

examples:

Devon's Anti-résumé 2007

 

Student Example (Relationship Resume)

Former Student Example (2006)